Where We Meet – Unwired Dance Theatre / The Cockpit Theatre, London

Unwired Dance Theatre’s Where We Meet sees audiences interact in different ways with dancers and their inner monologues.

Where We Meet

In a strange way, this brief, 30 minute interactive dance theatre performance reminds me of the best things about the creative industries during the pandemic.  A blending of technology and live performance elements to utilise space to best effect.  Exploring themes of human connection, isolation, and intimacy.  A choice in how far you want to go to immerse yourself in this new world.  It brought to mind things like this or this.

Where We Meet is a work by Unwired Dance Theatre.  It’s on for a very short run at the Cockpit Theatre in Marylebone, having previously won the Dansathon (‘the European Dance Hackathon’), and been staged at the Camden Fringe and elsewhere.  I caught a Saturday afternoon performance. 

The format is relatively simple, thanks to seamless technology.  Three dancers (Sara Augieras, Ryan Naiken and Livia Massarelli) are spotlit, each in their own space and seemingly their own world.  The audience are split into two groups: the Immersive Explorers, and the Compassionate Observers.  The Explorers wander at leisure, their headphones picking up each dancer’s audio as they approach (writing by Emma Nuttall, Caterina Grosoli, voice artists Lisa Ronkowski, Iain Ferrier and Zoë Trassl, with music by Christina Karpodini tying it all together).  The Observers do the same thing from the sidelines, swiping across a tablet to move their virtual position.  As we’ve established previously I love interactive theatre but also love choosing my level of interaction: I was thus a Compassionate Observer.

Connecting Through Technology

Approaching each dancer, the audio we hear is their inner monologue.  It’s intensely vulnerable.  And quite cathartic to listen to, actually.  Work problems, social pressure, challenges with body image: from within our own brains we can forget sometimes that our problems and insecurities are not so unique.  The interesting thing is in moving between the dancers.  And in how the dancers respond to the Explorers around them.  Each performance is unique, and each audience member’s experience is unique within it.  

Although I was a Compassionate Observer I was also in an exploratory mood.  It’s hard not to want to play around with the technology in something like this.  So I tried out areas where the narration was softer or overlapping, or absent.  The music was consistent.  I did of course spend most of my time listening to the narration, though. I started by moving between each dancer, until something caught my attention and I lingered a while.  Then I would see movement from the corner of my eye and head off (virtually) to visit another dancer.   The challenge and the fascination in Where We Meet is in the fact that these inner monologues are open to you, but not all at once.  You have to make choices.  It would be wonderful to see it more than once and follow a different path.

Co-Director and Choreographer Livia Massarelli and Co-Director and Creative Technology Lead Clemence Debaig have created something rather lovely here.  And the dancing and choreography are wonderfully immediate and interpretive without being overly literal. I hope you’ll be able to catch a future run in London or elsewhere: this very human, very technical piece of dance theatre deserves a wide audience.

Salterton Arts Review’s rating: 4/5

Where We Meet on at the Cockpit Theatre until 2 March 2025 only. More info here, or check out Unwired Dance Theatre here.